Not true I'm afraid. At a minimum most machines will have their primary interface and the hostname of its other interfaces within /etc/hosts.

Whilst you shouldn't underestimate the benefit of considering things that shouldn't happen in your environment, ie. access to root, that is not the reason for wanting to ensure we solely query DNS in this instance. DNS is my single source of truth and I do not wish to work with assumptions in order for my code to work.

Additionally it'll run across 100K+ hosts therefore you have to work with the lowest common denominator to ensure your code is portable across that number of hosts.

DNS is my single source of truth and I do not wish to work with assumptions in order for my code to work.

How can you be sure that DNS requests send / DNS responses received by your script or an underlying library are not manipulated?

Perl 5.8.8
Core modules
and force DNS lookup.

It seems the core modules of 5.8.8 are not sufficient to solve your problem, because there seems to be no interface to configure the DNS resolving functions. So you need to include code to resolve from Perl. Net::DNS can do that. It contains some XS code, but using XS is optional. The same is true for some Win32 specific dependancies. Read the Makefile.PL in Net::DNS for details. Include Net::DNS in your code, and you have complete control over name resolution.

This isn't really a Perl discussion now though.

Who cares? I still do not understand why you think that you need to resolve only using the DNS. What is your actual problem you want so solve?

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

He needs a script that can run on systems where he knows they will be configured to query DNS that would return reasonable FQDNs (where "fully qualified" is important) and where people using those systems might have good reason to set up short aliases in their /etc/hosts files for their own purposes. And now he has code for such a script that will get the fully qualified domain names he needs.

Went to join the gridlock to see it
Held an eclipse party
Watched a live feed
I cn"t see tge kwubosd to amswr thus
I tried to see it, but 8000 miles of rock got in the way
What eclipse?
Wanted to see it, but they wouldn't reschedule it
Read the book instead